The first Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell therapy (CAR T) for cancer was approved by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on August 30, 2017. As of 2025, a total of seven CAR T-cell therapies have been FDA approved. All of which have shown strong efficacy in the fight against cancer.
Although CAR T-cell therapies have led the way in the fight against cancer, especially blood cancer, researchers believe the next great breakthrough will come from Natural Killer cell based therapies.
As STAT, a health, medicine, and life sciences publication reports “NK cells are rapid responders in the fight against cancer that can recognize and destroy tumor cells without prior training.
“Unlike most T cell therapies, which require modifying each patient’s own cells, NK cells can be sourced from healthy donors, stem cells or cord blood banks to create an off-the-shelf, scalable treatment option.
“This difference could sidestep major hurdles in cell therapy, including high costs of therapy, toxicities and manufacturing bottlenecks that leave many patients without options.”
There are now clinical evidence showing that NK cells have the capability of delivering the results of CAR T cells, but with additional benefits including:
Lower toxicity, improved accessibility and scalability, and the potential to treat a wider range of cancer types beyond blood cancer.
For this reason, among others, CytoMed Therapeutics (a Singapore-based biotech listed on the Nasdaq with ticker symbol GDTC) has developed multiple products pipeline that include NK cell-based immunotherapy.
The company’s pipeline of cellular immunotherapies is based on novel technologies to manufacture “off-the-shelf” cellular-based cancer immunotherapies from healthy doner blood.
These products include the CAR-γδ T cell technology (CTM-N2D), unmodified γδ T cell technology (CTM-GDT) and iPSC-derived γδ NKT cell technology (gdNKT).
Excitingly, the gdNKT therapy exploits the combinatorial benefits of two immune cell types; the multiple antigen recognition systems of natural killer (NK) cells, and the GVHD (graft vs host disease) resistant γδ T cells for the treatment of a broad range of solid and blood cancers.
As noted earlier, STAT says, “Unlike most T cell therapies, which require modifying each patient’s own cells, NK cells can be sourced from healthy donors, stem cells or cord blood banks to create an off-the-shelf, scalable treatment option.”
In an effort to bolster its gdNKT technology, last October CytoMed acquired the cord blood banking license and assets of LongevityBank.
See more of CytoMed’s product pipeline, HERE
Or read STAT’s coverage on NK cells, HERE
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